There's also the dubious effectiveness of submitting culture / anthropology / environment articles to a place where people come looking for tech-startup and computer technology news.
That's emphatically wrong, and the most important thing to understand about HN. Any subject is on topic as long as it is intellectually interesting. As pg pointed out when he created this site, good hackers are interested in more than startups and computing. There's a reason why the site guidelines lead with that.